"Gotta move gotta choose
You've got a difference to make
Don't watch it happen again
Gotta change rearrange
Something's bending to break
It's just a matter of when"
-Vienna Teng
It's not that Kate doesn't care; it's just that she's never been good at staying in one place (she tells him as he rolls his eyes, reaches for the bottle.)
"I ain't judgin', am I?"
The shades are drawn and it's darker than normal, though she's not sure what normal even means anymore because normal went out the window the day she boarded a plane home and the day she told a government official that greeted her at the airport yes, it was just her and no, there was one else. Normal isn't her, Katherine Anne Austen, the girl who couldn't stay and who always had to run. Normal isn't this house, filled with ghosts and grief and silence, and normal certainly isn't the man in the corner, with his cigarette and tequila bottle and day-old stubble.
"You know if you come back next week, I won't be here." She puts a blue dish in the sink and the silence that follows feels heavy, stale and stagnant and almost foreign (like their lives. Like themselves.) Balling her hands into tiny fists, she fights an instinct that she hasn't felt since that day on the plane. Since she came home. And she asks because she suddenly needs to know.
"Why did you come here, Sawyer?"
It had caught her by surprise the day after they returned, when she opened the door to three knocks expecting to see Aaron, to see Claire, to see Miles or maybe even Lapidus. The sight she expected was anyone except Sawyer, leaning against the doorframe and looking every bit déjà vu as when they first crashed except for the fact that he wasn't leering from behind fuselage and the lines around his mouth were drawn, lips pressed together as if trying to hide some kind of unseen pain.
"Dunno." There's a distinct tone to his voice that she can't quite figure out, a cross between strained and gruff that comes out sounding like the most pitiful noise she's ever heard. "Guess I just needed someone to tell me I wasn't gonna be alone."
He raises his head, narrowed eyes focusing on dark brown ones.
"But you understand that, don't you?"
If she's going to be straight with him (and she can't remember if she's ever actually been straight with him) the honest-to-god truth is that she has no idea how to do this, hasn't ever had any idea how to do this. So even though she thinks the action might be all wrong, she makes the move anyway, just because she feels it's the least she can do.
Because she owes him that much.
Fingers wrap around his palm and he's not really any older than he was since the last time she saw him but something about his face looks aged (she thinks), features framed by hair longer than she remembers and eyes that are slightly unfocused and a little sad. Kate takes a breath, figures that if she's telling him, she might as well try to convince herself.
"You're not going be alone."
Week three.
(She's still here.)
She tells herself its Aaron, she tells herself its Claire, she tells herself anything that will make her believe it's not because of him that she's stopped running. Somewhere along the line he's all but moved in and she finally admits that she has no idea what to do with herself. Not the first time he reminds her and she knows it's true (the barracks seem like a million and one years ago) but she hasn't lived with someone since Jack, since the helicopter, since reading Alice in Wonderland by lamplight and accepting engagement rings under the covers.
"An' I haven't lived with someone since Juliet an' the day you came back on that goddamn plane. So what the hell's your point?"
(His point is, she knows, that he's hurting too.)
She tries to get him to talk about it (she tries) but he's resilient and moody and she gets it (fuck, does she get it) but she hates it. It reminds her too much of the old Sawyer, the one who pretended to hoard medication and who laughed at his friends' misfortunes and who stole guns just to prove a goddamn point. Sometimes she'll come home and find the house empty, whiskey bottles stacked neatly on the counter and receipts from gas stations crumpled in her trash can. It's always the same exchange when he walks in the door (where were you? none of your damn business) and she suspects that wherever he's disappearing to has something to do with the picture she finds him crying over at night when he thinks she's asleep in the next room.
(She hasn't slept well since Jack left her. She hasn't slept well in years.)
"You know, I was there that day too," she says one morning when he waves her off after breakfast and she hasn't meant to sound angry but Jesus Christ it's not like she's letting him bunk for free and eat all her food just so he can have a place to wallow. He shakes his head, long hair sliding across his face as he reaches for his jacket.
"Don't matter."
It matters, something inside of her screams. It fucking matters and she wants to follow him out the door, push him against the car and tell him how he's making her feel. She wants to be the old Kate, the one that would run after him and force him to talk because she didn't care and he didn't care and they didn't care. She wants him to fight back, to get angry and call her some stupid nickname because at least getting angry would mean something mattered.
And right now, Kate needs something around here to matter.
In her mind, she runs after him. In reality, she stands at the counter and picks at a scar above her elbow, sliding fingernails underneath braised skin until she begins to bleed.
They sleep separately, her in the bedroom and him in the living room and though he probably could (she expects it, even) he never oversteps his boundaries. One day, she comes out of the bathroom, takes a sip from the green cup on the table (he's always careful to wait if he wakes before her, making coffee and reading the paper or at least pretending to.)
"Somethin' wrong?"
And Kate doesn't know what to say, resting her lips against the rim of the ceramic glass and biting hard into the side of the cup as if it will do something to help the pain that she feels spreading through her insides. Like someone doused her with gasoline and set her on fire and caused her to scream silently, invisible flames traveling up and down her body, making it difficult to focus and difficult to breathe.
She sits up a little straighter and finally puts the cup down, letting it settle with shaking hands.
"Jack hated sugar in his coffee."
He pushes back in his chair, shoulders dropping a little further to the left and she sees something rise in his throat. She wonders if maybe this is it, if maybe he'll finally cry to someone other than the couch pillow, but he doesn't. He simply steadies himself and stares out the window as if trying to make sense of something that doesn't quite exist, some phantom vision that could maybe become real if you imagined it hard enough.
"Juliet loved it."
The grief hangs in the air between them like an anchor, a too heavy anchor weighing down a small boat and with each passing moment of silence Kate feels herself sinking lower and lower, to the point where she just might be able to touch the floor of the ocean. It reminds her how a few weeks after the crash, Miles paid a visit but left two days short. Sawyer thought it was because he got bored. Kate suspects it was because they were too sad, because it was hard too hard for someone who didn't fully understand the scope of their loss to be in a place where feeling pain wasn't an option but a requirement of residency.
You're a regular crackhouse where his words as he walked out the door.
(She's starting to believe he may be right.)
It's easier when they can joke about the things in their past. Like the day he picked up one of Clementine's toy police cars and told her he was sorry he never got to see her in handcuffs (she rolls her eyes at that one, looks away.)
"Time travel back a few years and you'll have your fantasy," she deadpans while wondering if it's going too far, joking about things like time travel in his presence. He doesn't leave and she doesn't push him about it and for awhile, things become stationary. A month passes, seasons changing and a pony-tailed blonde with blue eyes asking for "daddy" more than she asks for "mom."
A month passes.
(She's still here.)
One night, she leaves to do an errand of her own and comes back to a dark house, a half-asleep body sprawled across the couch and a hand that grabs her wrist when she moves to turn on the light.
"James." She's startled enough to use the name she never calls him by as he pulls her closer, sleep-deprived eyes searching her face. She hasn't seen a look like that since their first kiss, the one she didn't even want.
"You wanna."
Kate used to think she knew what it felt like when people said they had out-of-body experiences, that when your head got light and your vision blurred and everyone talked but you couldn't really understand what anyone was saying because you weren't seeing and you were just there, that was having an out-of-body experience. But then the plane crashed and she stitched up Jack with his damn black thread and she sat on the chopper with Aaron and those, those were real out-of-body experiences, moments of her life that she'll never get back because she didn't know at the time that she was actually living them, these things that seemed too surreal and too strange to comprehend.
So when she moves, leaning forward, lips meeting and his tongue tracing the skin around her mouth, it feels like that all over again, like she's watching someone who's afraid to touch but even more afraid to pull away, who tenses only for a moment before giving back. Accepting, adapting to familiar scents that are reminders of nights in the jungle when they used to play with each other's bodies because it felt right and because they needed each other, this broken man who hated his past and this broken woman who was born to run.
He pulls back, moving slowly out of her vision but she reaches out and grabs the side of his face before he can look away.
"Why?"
He knows why and she knows why but question hangs in the air as if neither of them wants to answer. He can't admit he needs someone that's not Juliet and she can't admit she needs someone that's not Jack and they both can't admit that they need each other the way they once did because admitting that would mean that they've accepted their losses and they're ready to move on.
It would mean accepting the fact that they people they love are really gone, and that they're not coming back.
She doesn't ask him to stay that night (wouldn't be mad if he didn't) but he does and she does. It's the first time since Jack that she's let someone touch her and she can tell by the way his hands move across her body that it's the first time since Juliet he's let someone touch him. It becomes a strange thing, this grieving process that they adapt to, where everything becomes both weird and strangely familiar and she's not sure anymore what's fake and what's real. She still says his name and he still says her name and when the complexity of it all overwhelms her, pushes her to a breaking point, she cries harder than she did when Jack left, when their friends died, when Sawyer was about to be on the receiving end of a bullet he didn't deserve. And suddenly, she knows that all this is real. So are the nightmares, parts of the Island falling into the sea like building blocks knocked over by a child and coils of thick black smoke reaching for her out of nowhere, images that awaken something inside that she thought she had long since put to rest.
And Sawyer and his loss. That's real, too.
The day they do decide to talk about it, they're both sitting in bed. Fully clothed, the only naked thing between them is their brain and their words and their feelings, everything that they've kept bottled since the day they returned. She hasn't kicked him out because it's comfortable, it feels a little bit like it once was and at night when she cries he doesn't pretend that he can't hear her.
(She doesn't pretend she can't hear him, either.)
"You first." He pushes hair from his eyes and she looks down, smoothes the bed covers with shaking hands, remembers different hands on the covers and a different body next to her.
"I never told him. I never told him that I loved him. I mean, I did…at the end. And before that, I guess. A bunch of times that we were together, when we left the Island…but not at first." She's not even sure of the things she's saying, she suddenly feels like she's only talking because it feels like there's some sort of confession that needs to be made. Like he's the only damn person she ever cared about lying to that she has to make amends with. He looks up and she blinks away the film she feels clouding her eyes, watches him carefully as he shifts against the pillow.
"Your turn."
The silence makes her wonder if he'll even answer, if it's been so long that his regrets don't exist anymore the same way they do for her. She knows he carries her ghost everywhere; she would be fool to not see the phantom body and blonde hair in every move and every look. She knows pain isn't new to him. Knows it never was. But he's had more time, years and days to deal with what she's had moments and seconds to understand and sometimes it just seems unfair, the whole damn thing that they're going through, just because the world decided it needed one less Jack and one less Juliet.
"I should've gotten to her sooner." He speaks finally, looking away. "I shouldn't have let her think that…that she could let go."
It's hard, suddenly, to form words, and there's a vice around her body, something that makes her head spin as she pushes a hand against her mouth, stares at the man who's sleeping on her couch and eating her food and helping her live, the man that belongs to a woman that's already dead. She backs out of bed, hands finding solace against the bathroom door it's not running, not really and presses her spine against the carved wood while angling her face towards darkest part of the room, where he can't watch her cry.
He doesn't speak after that, and doesn't ask her to come back to bed.
But eventually, she does.
Days pass. Weeks pass. And then some months pass. He starts to relax into someone she's more familiar with and she realizes how long it's been since he's felt like someone she knows, how good it feels to be able to recognize him again even though he still closes himself off at times. What she thought could never feel normal becomes one of the most normal things she's felt in awhile, and she forgets sometimes that this isn't really them, that they're just compensating for something bigger and more overwhelming than they can both handle.
Miles starts to come around again and this time stays for longer than a few days, while James disappears more often, coming home late with mud on his jacket and crayon stains on his jeans. Kate watches him walk through the door and tries to swallow down the jealousy, not so much at the reconciliation but more at the fact that he's healing and she's still stuck here, still trying to make sense of how to figure out this loss that seems a little too strange to be real.
She's healing, though. Or at least trying to.
One day, when the leaves are starting to change colors (she forgot even that, that leaves change colors and there's not just one season of everything) he comes home earlier than expected and announces in no uncertain terms that he's leaving. She feels herself start to panic at his words, not because of what they mean but because of what she feels, and realizes she hasn't entirely admitted to herself that she's not ready to go back to before, to being alone with her thoughts and her fears. But as she watches him pack up his shampoo and his razor and his few articles of clothing, she knows she can't stop him.
He's had his time to grieve, to make it matter. He's had his time to cry.
And now he needs to start finding his way back.
"I think I'll go to Rachel," is the response when she asks where he'll end up and of course it starts with Rachel, because it was always going to start with Rachel. Rachel and Julian and she's not sure who else because he never said much about her family, she just knows what he chose to share in overly emotional moments. Kate simply nods, wonders how much strength it actually takes to be able to face someone like that, someone who didn't even know half of what the person they loved had been through and who had to hear the whole story from a stranger.
She could never go to Sarah. She could've never gone to Claire if the circumstances were different than what they were.
Wrapping her arms around her chest, she smiles through the mask she feels starting to slide into place before she takes a breath. No masks. She's done with masks, with hiding and running and pretending, and it's been six months.
(She's still here.)
"You can always find me. You know, when you get back." It's a throw-away comment, words that fall on deaf ears because she knows he's not going to come back but she has to say it for herself, has to hear the words from her own mouth to try to believe that they might have a bit of truth in them. He steps up next to her, puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes once in response.
"I know."
She doesn't say goodbye. He doesn't say goodbye. Its part of a history they have where they don't really need to say anything, so they just watch each other as he walks out the door and she follows him with her eyes even after he turns his back. The car goes slower than she expects and she thinks maybe it was an imaginative thing when she saw it speeding away, peeling down the road as if it couldn't get away from the past fast enough.
Maybe not everyone is born to run.
She watches from the window until she can't see the taillights anymore, until everything is silent except for the television and the quiet hum of the dishwasher, quiet domestic reminders of a life that's now hers and hers alone, a life that she has to try to continue to piece together and move on with.
Take me four days at least to get to Miami that's what he had told her over breakfast while she smiled, held her gaze and nodded in silence. It's a long way back but he'll get there, and somehow, she knows that.
She'll get there, too.